Autonomous 'Road Trains' Will Usher in the Driverless Future

You might imagine self-driving cars as Blade Runner-type pods zipping around the city (even if they do look like Little Tikes toys), but perhaps the closest future of autonomous vehicles offers a much more mundane proposition: "road trains."

The Sunday Times reported that the UK is looking to test automated lorry convoys from next year. These are basically groups of lorries that drive in sync with one another, snaking along motorways with just a few yards between their bumpers.

The Times explains that the lorry in front is still driven by a human, and that their controls would be shared with all other vehicles in the convoy over wifi, so the group would move as an homogenous train. You'd still have drivers in the other vehicles—though they could presumably be playing Flappy Bird or painting their nails or whatever—and sensors on the vehicles would help keep the carriages in check.

Automating trucks, as opposed to smaller cars, seems like a no-brainer: They drive a lot of miles, often on predictable journeys, and (no doubt because of that) driver focus can be a real safety issue.

The convoy idea was first tested on a regular public road in Spain by Volvo as part of the European Commission's Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) project back in 2012, though in that case the lead truck was followed by three regular cars. It's also previously been trialled on closed roads by Daimler in Germany and Scania in Sweden, and the Netherlands already plans to introduce driverless lorries in its Rotterdam port.

According to the Daily Mail, Scania claims their road trains could cut emissions by 10 percent owing to the decreased drag between the closely sandwiched vehicles. That also means less fuel consumption, and the main attraction to lorry companies is clear: Drivers that can work longer without a break and fewer stops for gas is an economically attractive proposal.

As Neville Jackson, CTO of engineering firm Ricardo, the industry lead in the SARTRE project, told the Financial Times last month, "For me it's all driven by economics: how can we deliver more goods at a lower price by improving the utilisation of vehicles and drivers."

But there are also potential drawbacks, the most obvious being that a great hulking fleet of huge trucks with drivers looking at their iPads instead of the road is quite a daunting prospect for other road users.

Around the Swedish tests back in October, AA president Edmund King told the Times that he didn't think the road trains would be well-suited to British roads. "There would be obvious dangers of long platoons blocking road signs, obstructing cars getting on and off motorways and intimidating some drivers," he said.

It's pretty much the same old chestnut as with regular driverless cars: It all makes perfect sense if every vehicle on the road is automated and able to communicate with each other, but different issues arise when robots are sharing space with humans. An automated car might be able to tell that it should hang back and let a connected convoy pass before attempting that awkward right turn, but your own driving skills might feel a little shaky faced with a whole chain of lorries driving seemingly dangerously close to one another.

There's also surely a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of the lead driver, whose steering, acceleration and braking will apply to all vehicles in the platoon.

The UK's test ambitions, which haven't yet been approved, follow the country's clear desire to make itself a key player in the testing phase of driverless cars. Last month, chancellor George Osborne announced a £10 million fund for R&D projects to test autonomous vehicles, along with a review of road regulations.